GLENN GREENWALD—It is really hard to overstate how consequential and how nefarious this disinformation industry is. It received woefully inadequate attention until the emergence of these articles. It is one of the greatest threats to a free Internet yet manufactured. It is rapidly spreading as a result of the backing of some of the world’s most powerful governments and most influential neo-liberal billionaires. And without hyperbole or melodrama, its goal is nothing less than the end of the Internet as one of our last instruments for expressing and organizing meaningful dissent.
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A GARLAND NIXON ESSAY—As Iran, not to mention Russia or China, have amply demonstrated, the Anglo-American empire is no longer the sole possessor of superior and lethal military technology, says Garland Nixon. This new balancing of military power is now clearly limiting the use of US military muscle in the criminal manner the Washington elites and their accomplices around the world had grown accustomed to. This is a welcome and long-awaited development for humanity, but, reminds us Garland, “the US empire is still a massive economic and military superpower that has fallen into the hands of psychopaths.”
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A VIDEO ESSAY BY GONZALO LIRA: Sounds harsh and even flippant, but the logic of history and economics is irrefutable. The US empire is going down, a victim of its own obvious mistakes, the weight of innumerable errors neglected by the colossal level of hubris and corruption permeating the ruling elites of the West, headquartered in Washington, and the inexorable, myopic often chaotic thinking inherent in capitalism. Ironically, it is not solely the defeats in the military sense that are contributing so much to the downfall from supremacy, although they represent a major component of the problem, but, as Lira points out, the concomitant bloating of the financial sphere, where the accumulating contradictions of capitalism, chiefly the US public and private debt, and the resulting loss of dollar solvency, are causing a refusal by hitherto key “vassal” nations (i.e., Saudi Arabia) to continue trading exclusively in dollars. This, says Lira, and we agree entirely, is hammering the last nails into the Anglo-American empire coffin, regardless of the outcome of the Ukrainian war.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses the Russian people (and the world) on the accession of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhye Region and the Kherson Region to the Russian Federation, September 30, 2022. This speech, which just about every thinking person in the West should watch, has been effectively banned and buried by Western media, which, never impartial and certainly never trustworthy, has now plainly become little more than depraved totalitarian propaganda.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias. The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future, even though you keep doing things to make it increasingly likely, is just being a fucking idiot. It’s like Wile E Coyote jumping up and down on the land mine until it explodes because it didn’t explode when the Roadrunner ran over it.
